Children don't dissolve in the rain: A story about parenthood and playwork

By Adele Cleaver

Part memoir, part manifesto, Children don't dissolve in the rain is about prioritising play. The importanc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adele Cleaver
• Release date: Jul 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781898068099

Adele Cleaver

Adele Cleaver was born in Birmingham in the 1980s. She describes herself as a nomadic Brummie whose wanderlust has taken her to the likes of Lisbon, Accra, Tokyo, Salvador da Bahia, even Timbuktu. She now lives in Bournemouth on the south coast of England with her husband and four year old daughter. She started writing in November 2019 through an art therapy course she enrolled on after her second miscarriage. She began reflecting on her varied career in playwork and how her professional experiences helped her overcome some of the challenges of parenthood. She found her approach to raising their child very different from her peers: she makes play her priority. Her book is a playful manifesto about the importance of play: her play, her daughter's play and play in the community.

Book preview

Cover_artwork_-_Children_don't_dissolve_in_the_rain_by_Adele_Cleaver_Artwork_by_Sarah_Ray_and_Sally_Ray_(v2.5).jpg

Copyright © 2021 Adele Cleaver

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 9781898068099

Published by Meynell Games Publications, Eastbourne, UK

Contents

Acknowledgements

Playful People

Foreword

Prologue

Part 1 - Born to play

What if we listen to our children?

We play here

Sirens and soil

A passport to play

Safety, love

Education, education, education

I like the way you move

Incredible

Rich kids’ playground

My official graduation

The broom cupboard

Advocating for play

Loose parts play

The otherside

Awesome

Part 2 - No time to play

What if we are told to find a play–life balance?

Not so Great for me

F’s Bakery

London dread

Out in the community

Learning to listen

Slowing down

Part 3 - Motherhood,

What if we bring new parents bountiful boxes of brunch and nutritious snacks instead of baby grows?

Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside

My prenatal courses

Dance like nobody’s watching

Broken nipples

Still broken and very miserable

Well-meaning but well annoying

Fatherhood, brother good

Mama’s Delight

Part 4 - Can I bring my baby?

What if societies just accepted that babies came along for the ride?

No turning back

Leisure pleasure

Saturday Night Fever

Shitshow

Bodyrock

When you play, you know it

Cuba Libre

It takes two to tango

Hell on earth

Part 5 - When parents play

What if we pay attention to ourselves as much as we pay attention to our children?

Parents need to play

Article 31a: An adult’s right to play

Thalassophile vs Christmas

Papa Power

That library book

Shag rota

Part 6 - Wearing my playwork hat at home

What if we stop trying to control our children?

Nerd alert

Observing her play

Respecting their privacy

Urban wonder

Play fighting

Our play kitchen

Sharing is caring

Why should I tidy my room when the world is in such a mess?

Part 7 - Persistently playful

What if we stop trying to control ourselves?

Don’t believe the hype

Working towards expert status

That night in the armchair

Baby raver

Drop n Go

Sweet FA!

Shit shit shit

Part 8 - We never know what women are going through

Come to rest

She held her own

Nature heals

Beautiful Stranger

Conclusion - Learning from my village of playful people

Kez

Kofi

Rosie

El bandito

The borrowed bigger kid

Sexy Man

Vovó

My Final Thoughts

Para a minha flor,

While you’re still young,

Find your heart and find your soul.

The Cat Empire

Acknowledgements

Well, this has been quite a process! First and foremost, I’d like to show some huge gratitude to Mr Lowprofile for doing far more than his fair share of bedtimes so I could escape motherhood and get lost in my thoughts and notebooks. I’ve been saying ‘I promise I am nearly finished’ for months and months and months! I don’t think either of us really anticipated how time-consuming this little project of mine would become so, meu amor, your patience is, as ever, appreciated. During this writing journey we celebrated ten years together; thank you for believing in me and trusting me to share our personal life. Obrigada.

Although I revelled in escaping to a quiet corner of our home to write, read and re-write, the whole process was at times lonely so thank you to Amber, Abi, Jono and Daisy who read this very early on and encouraged me to keep going. Natalie Koussa from Uncommon People helped me with accountability and kept me on track in the middle stages. And when I decided to self-publish, Judy Tweddle gave me invaluable editorial advice, Justyna A Bielecka from JAB Proofreading has been a huge help in getting through this final hurdle and Wendy Russell provided such a wonderful Foreword. Thank you all.

Then there’s all the Brummies! Where would I be without my Brummies?! But particularly, Jen & Aunty Britt, Sara & Uncle Mike and the radical women of community play – El Dorada, Agent Garnham, Simbi, Sandra, Carol and the Seven Up mums; you have no idea how much you taught me about raising children well before I anticipated having my own.

Thank you to Patrick Morrow, the host of The Parent Journey podcast, for helping me to find my voice through podcasting. I think the conversations that took place over the twenty or so episodes are truly precious, and I am not just saying that because I like listening to a Brummie (and their mate) talk about childhood and play! The recordings helped to gather my thoughts, provoked new thinking and boosted my confidence to keep on writing.

All our villagers in Bournemouth – you know who you are – biggup yourselves and thank you for being part of our life. A special thank you to Teresa and Helen for reaffirming my belief in sisterhood, and to Natasha and Assis for creating spaces for human connection through movement. One special ‘Ta Bab’ to Dani, founder of First Friends, the most inclusive preschool in Bournemouth. You have been an absolute wonder woman for many local families and super generous and flexible with extra childcare for us when there were simply not enough hours in the day to finish and publish this book.

There’s a whole gaggle of playworkers... all my colleagues in Brum, the youth workers in Westminster (I truly cherish some of those epic Saturday adventures with Des driving the minibus). A huge, huge thank you to the Thursday morning Reflective Practice gang – effectively a group of strangers who really got me through the bizarre unfoldings of 2020 and inspired me with new insight, so much knowledge, and gave me a generous space to untangle some of my perceptions, curiosities and challenges of play and being a playworker. A special thanks to Penny for inviting me along in the first place and to Meynell for helping at the publication stage. I can’t wait to meet you all in person; what a surreal thought.

Last but not least my faaaaaaamily. My wonderful sibs, our lovely padres, and our growing brood to whom we pass our playful baton. I love you all.

Playful People

I reached out and asked for 50 friends to come forward and help soften the financial blow of self-publishing by buying a copy of my book waaaay before it was done and ready. Your generosity and trust was much appreciated. It was also a great motivation to finish the task in hand.

A massive thank you to Becka White, Kellie Cash, Vero Leopoldino, Tante Britt, Christine Jameson, Natalie Koussa, Zietta Rosie, Irene Cleaver, Tia Frank-sense and Tio Cheikh, Abby Perrins, The Urwins, Lisa May, Jenny B, Karen Stone, Sophie Leon, Helen Gialias, Sachels n’ Keitles, Susie & Evie, The Pearsons, Meriel Camara, and the rest of you who preferred not to be named.

Foreword

Thank you, Adele, for this treasure of a book. It had me at times laughing, weeping, nodding in recognition and disagreeing, probably all in equal measure and often all at the same time. It is an eloquent and deeply personal account of exploring what playwork – and other forms of non-judgmental support for things that matter – has to offer being a parent. Given its personal nature, often my response to the book was to reflect on my own experiences. I too was a playworker before I was a mother, and the skills I learned served me well both as a parent and as a daughter supporting both my parents through dementia in later life. I have often wondered if I would have been a different kind of playworker (or parent) if I’d had my children before discovering playwork. I’ve also often thought that it would be a brilliant research project to talk to the children of playworkers, many of whom will now be parents and grandparents themselves. The Maya Angelou of the children’s workforce is how you describe playworkers, adapting ‘Still I Rise’ with impunity: ‘does my playfulness offend you?’

Even though the experiences of being a mother you recount are located firmly in the 21st century, there are, despite your frequent descriptions of differences between the generations, many parallels with my own experiences of motherhood in the 1980s and 1990s. You talk much about the village you gathered around you to raise your child. I think I did something similar, although of course not in exactly the same ways. One of your stories that resonated with me was the hiring of a dance studio. I too was part of a group that hired a hall like you did, providing somewhere for us to be together with our children – although this was unceremoniously called ‘the dump’, since half the parents would stay and the other half would leave their children and have a couple of hours off. Whilst both aspects (time with other parents and children and time away from the children) were valued, the name describes it perfectly. As you say, if you don’t look after yourself, you are not so well placed to look after others.

Actually, ‘the dump’ was a group where fathers were involved in caring for their children, in contrast to your experience of your parents’ generation, where this was not the case. In my own family, I was the one that went back to work and my male partner did the bulk of the daytime childcare for many years, although there was a stretch of about three or four years where we ran a co-operative catering company together with friends of ours and shared both the work and the childcare across both families. More than three decades later, those children are still firm friends and our original extended-but-not-related family (why is there no name for this fairly common phenomenon?) group of 8 is now 18, although we have also sadly lost some along the way. My son now works part time and shares equally in the childcare for his own daughter, but that has all been during the pandemic lockdown, so the whole thing has been weird.

It got me thinking about how attitudes towards women, mothers and children don’t progress in an orderly manner along a neat, straight line towards what some might call equality or justice. The same is true for other forms of injustice and the intersections between them. The 1980s were the tail end of three decades or more of strong civil rights activism, including the powerful second wave of feminism. We did our best to live our lives according to our values, something that was not always easy. We felt we were breaking new ground, doing things differently. It pulled me up a little short to read your experience of feeling that in involving your husband in the childcare you were also doing something radically new. But what this highlights is the complex and non-linear ways that issues of equality, diversity and justice change over time.

I could say the same about playwork too. In my early playwork days, we were very well funded, there were more of us, most of us worked full time and so it was much easier to have a local village of playworkers – others that we could meet up with regularly and chew the fat and reflect on what we did. We even ran a housing co-operative for play, youth and community workers, creating veritable villages in the council housing stock deemed unfit for families. Now, after decades of sustained neglect and funding cuts, we are arguably better at articulating what it is we do, but no-one seems to be listening, at least not the people with money. Our village though has changed and grown to a digitally enabled global village and we can learn from each other in many different ways. Still we rise indeed.

If you went back to Lisbon now, Adele, I could put you in touch with a fantastic playwork organisation that you would immediately feel an affinity with. Looks like you were there at the wrong time, and possibly also at GOSH at the wrong time too. Moments of could-have-beens. But who needs could-have-beens when you describe the present with such immediate power, detail, wit and honesty. Still you rise, bab.

Dr Wendy Russell, April 2021

Independent researcher in children’s play and playwork

Visiting Fellow at University of Gloucestershire

mom

[mom] noun

_________________

One’s mother. In Brummie. Also American.

See also: mum

Prologue

The house lights dimmed in the theatre where we had sat our bums on the unsteady temporary tiered seating. My finger hovered over the mouse when I’d sat looking at the booking system a few weeks earlier. After too much internal deliberation over whether it was best to sit closer to the exit, or on the back row as far away from the rest of the audience as possible, I opted to sit with my friends. I deliberately chose the aisle seat, a few rows back from the double doors, should I need to make a swift exit.

Twenty minutes earlier, as I stepped through the automatic sliding doors of the main entrance, I felt like a regular; it was an arts centre I’d frequented many a time before. In the theatre I’d seen a handful of shows and in the community dance studios on the other side of the building I’d often attended dance classes. Yes, I was definitely a regular, but on this occasion, I felt irregular.

I held back as the crowd shuffled from the foyer to the theatre with their miniature bottles of Blossom Hill and plastic cups in hand. Bodies were already cluttered with heaps of coats and scarves folded over their arms, but they hastily took a programme and exchanged tickets for stubs from the smiling ushers at the door. It was a normal show, but I was still adjusting to my new normal.

Typically, Papa was on a late shift on the one night I wanted him home. I needed to go to that show. I’d been spoiled with multicultural arts my entire life. Opportunities that I took for granted in Birmingham were few and far between when we settled on the sleepy south coast of England. The performance was only fifty minutes long so it seemed more trouble than it was worth to express a load of breastmilk and book a babysitter who would only fret about all the bottles and cups that would be refused until I came home.

And of course, buying the ticket was a bit of a treat at sixteen quid, plus the extortionate town-centre car-park fee, so paying a babysitter on top of that just made seeing a show really, really expensive – too expensive for my maternity allowance budget, especially for less than an hour’s entertainment, so I decided to take her with me.

Upon arrival all the fellow humans – ticket holders and staff – had cooed at my bright-eyed cherub dangling from my torso. They had smiled and nodded at me in what I interpreted as approval when we were out in the foyer, but as we took to our seat I was nervous. Of course, I hid my unease behind the incredible little human I had on my lap and treasured the sanctuary of my sisterhood at my side. I was among friends: mostly fellow amateur dancers, mothers and grandmothers with whom I had grooved throughout my pregnancy. They were used to seeing our daughter out on the community arts scene with me. But I really didn’t know how the strangers in the audience would react to sharing their night at the theatre with a baby.

The auditorium doors closed and the stage lights darkened. As one silhouette took to the stage in silence, I cradled my daughter close and popped my nipple into her mouth. She obligingly sucked, but I had, very naively, never expected the opening scene from an African dance company to be a cappella. That’s what I love about the arts: we can’t predict another person’s creativity.

Motherhood is also full of surprises: that night the sheer volume of my nine-month-old daughter’s suckle took me by surprise.

‘How had I never noticed the noise of her gob slapping against my boob?’ I asked myself, starting to panic.

As she enthusiastically gulped at my breast I broke into a violent sweat. Maybe it was the synthetic fabric on the pull-down seats, or maybe it was because THE AUDITORIUM WAS FILLED WITH THE ACOUSTICS OF MY NIPPLE.

Each slurp was followed by a satisfying nasal inhalation while her equally vigorous exhalations bounced off the long black curtain at each side of the stage where a beautiful piece of choreography was unfolding. How could her neat button nose be making such a racket? My body started to rise out of my seat as panic told me I needed to leave.

Simultaneously my daughter and my friend stopped me in my tracks. Just as my instinctive little child raised her hand and placed it on my chest to feel my palpitations, the friend occupying the not-so-sweaty seat next to me felt my hurry to leave. She carefully grabbed my arm, the one that wasn’t cradling my baby, and hissed firmly, ‘Stay!’

I sat with gritted teeth, flaring nostrils and a clammy back, desperately waiting for the silent scene on the stage to be over. The figurine continued to move with robust elegance against an intense-orange-lit backdrop. My body burned.

Before long an inviting percussion ensemble kicked in. It was so sudden that my almost sleeping babe was called to attention. Never one to miss out on the action, she stood, present and correct, on my lap for the duration of the spirited, dynamic performance.

My dad is the only white man I know with a record collection of bands from Congo, Senegal, South Africa, Mali, Ghana, etc. For as long as I can remember I have been magnetised to these flamboyant rhythms. And there, in the darkness of the theatre, my baby daughter was connecting with them too.

Her childhood was only just beginning while the soundtrack of that show brought memories of mine flooding back. Amongst the shadows of the dancers on stage were joyful images of my childhood in Birmingham and the colourful citizens that lined the streets of our second city. I saw the faces and the spaces of the place where I’ll probably never reside again but will always call home. My upbringing by a liberal duo afforded me healthy doses of unfamiliar cultures, community arts festivals and being dragged to gig after gig after gig with songs that were often not sung in English.

Our summers were spent roaming around in a rusting Ford Transit which was converted into a holiday home for six. From dawn to dusk, in British and European countryside my three siblings and I played freely amongst ourselves and with children who were drawn to our clan. Through the global language of play we connected with our peers; moving sand around for hours, running barefoot in fields and making things to play with from whatever we scavenged while our parents embraced a timelessness that didn’t exist in their working lives back home.

My dad’s vinyl, lovingly recorded onto ninety-minute blank cassettes, were my soundtrack to these summers. As he drove us from concrete to countryside, his wedding ring tapped against the vibrating steering wheel, mimicking the rhythms that were blaring from the mediocre speakers.

The same rhythms were floating about the stage in front of me while I was now holding his fifth grandchild. Barely blinking, she remained fixated on the colourful action unravelling beneath the bright lights of the stage. She bounced and yelped in unison with the audience’s laughter and cheers.

She reached out to hold the movement of her ancestors close.

Her intrigue and curiosity, and my enjoyment of a fiercely entertaining show, both reinforced that I could, and would, bring my baby wherever I bloody well pleased. Since the mid-1980s I have been growing a healthy addiction to play: I couldn’t suddenly give it up the moment I gave birth to an incredible human who required my care. With babe in arms it became very clear to me that I needed the freedom of choice and the intrinsically motivated decision making I’ve developed from living playfully. Muddling through these first three years of her life has given me a newfound appreciation of living a life full of play.

Part 1 - Born to play

What if we listen to our children?

Since I had a baby and found myself, day in day out, chatting about our children’s play with the mamas and papas of baby Joe Bloggs in the park, I started to realise just how much my playwork career had taught me. With closer mama friends we’d talk for hours about the nuances of their play, what was happening inside our babies’ incredible brains and, of course, we’d daydream collaboratively about how we could ditch the kids and go get lost on a dancefloor to rekindle some of that brilliant juicy good stuff we knew our brains also needed.

When I started sharing that I was writing a book about play, well-meaning people have started introducing me as a ‘play’ pause ‘expert? specialist? consultant?’ Playworker doesn’t seem to cut it.

‘Children are the experts of play. I am a playworker,’ I said to a colleague when she asked me if she should introduce me as a Play Expert in a meeting with local artists.

‘Yes, but you have to think about the connotations of the word worker. It is low-grade, poorly paid, you deserve more. I mean you have worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital after all.’

Bang! There it was again, those few months of employment that keep coming back to haunt me. Everyone sees the playwork of world-renowned Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) but no one sees ‘the experts’ at play every single day. I guess that is what has geared me up to write this book.

I was appointed as a hospital playworker at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) in the early summer of 2012. Just a few weeks later the world was entertained with hundreds of gowned children dancing in illuminated hospital beds and roller-skating healthcare professionals parading in celebration of our beloved NHS. When Danny Boyle put nine children from Great Ormond Street in the spotlight of the London Olympics Opening Ceremony I sobbed on my sofa with pride. He hit a chord. My GOSH ID badge attached to my pot of hand gel dumped on the coffee table in a Friday night slump was a teeny tiny validation that I was part of that spectacular. I was playing my part in that heroic workforce.

When I received the call to congratulate me on succeeding in the interview I thought I had ‘made it’ in the world of playwork. I hadn’t. Life at GOSH hit me hard. Their approach to play was miles off the wonderful baptism of fire I had experienced in the underground network of inclusive community play in Birmingham.

My job interview had been at the end of a warren of dark corridors where the play office was tucked away. The old building was worlds away from the new modern annexe that screamed world-class health innovation and pioneering science. The old building was a reminder of the hospital’s institutional history of well-meaning philanthropists. The location of the play team HQ, however, was a statement in itself: play is not a priority here. The experienced, wiser me would have taken the role with caution.

Just as the GOSH playworkers’ office was tucked away in the dark ages, so were the playworkers. The woman I was instructed to shadow used a high-pitched, soppy voice every time she spoke to a child. Everything was ‘Awwwwwwww how lovely’ and ‘awwwwwww he’s so cute’ and ‘awwwww she’s so sweet’. I found it patronising and she really pissed me off.

I’ve always wanted to empower children, not fuss over them. I’ve dotted around quite a few childcare settings now and, in each setting, I have noticed a tendency amongst adults to change our voice when we speak to children. Tone change is often necessary; pitch, on the other hand, grates on me. The piercing shrill of that well-meaning, kind and compassionate young woman still haunts me. It is by no means her fault that she speaks to children like that; it is probably how the adults in her life spoke to her. Worse still, she was permanently smiley and sociable and apparently liked around the workplace; I felt I had to act like her to be accepted. It was not really me. The real me was utterly lost in this play setting.

After a couple of weeks I ditched Miss Shrill and her colouring sheets and her spoon-fed, manufactured craft packs from Baker Ross and I introduced play the way I knew how: by building dens with hospital bedsheets, junk modelling with medical supplies and playing with Doctor’s torches in semi-darkened rooms to create shadow puppets. I was slowly reuniting with my Brummie playworker mojo and I thought maybe there was hope after all. When I created enriching, uplifting, a little less ordinary experiences for children wired-up in bed I was taken to one side by my line manager.

She was smiley and enthusiastic and I thought she was going to commend my creativity and encourage more. The entrepreneur in me has a tendency to run away, quickly scheming new ideas and projects. In split seconds I saw waiting-room colouring sheets replaced with large pieces of foam; huge, lightweight, infection-control-compliant building blocks for big open-ended child-led play for families awaiting the unknown.

I thought about bringing long pieces of gutters to bed-bound patients for exploring moving objects or even water. Ideas were flashing in front of me and I smiled. And then a pinprick burst my bubble as I was politely told that I could not initiate that kind of play here. Each patient’s isolation room was a